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Luka’s smile was surprised, like he had not expected that request at all. “Sure.”
“Thanks.” Amaru smiled back, happy to stick close to Luka for a while longer.
Sunlight and having his mates would put him in a much better mood.
But seriously, how did he wake up his clan?
Amaru was…well…Luka hadn’t known quite what to expect when they’d finally located the mage. Sure, he’d dreamed of him. Supposedly multiple times, but he only recalled one and it was all fuzzy and murky now. Certainly didn’t do him justice.
Appearing to be in his thirties, Amaru was about five-nine, with a slender build covered in lean muscles. Even after centuries of being away from the sun, his skin was a luscious copper brown—what he could see that wasn’t hidden under countless tattoos. Luka’s gaze skimmed over them, taking in what seemed to be mostly abstract designs with a smaller number of pictographs of animals and plants. The scholar in him was curious about what they all meant.
Amaru’s wide, chestnut brown eyes were almost obscured beneath floppy dark hair that brushed the nape of his neck and the couple of beaded necklaces that hung there. A ridiculously thick fringe of black eyelashes framed his eyes, highlighting them better than any bottled eyeliner could dream of.
The only thing more hypnotic than his eyes was his lips. Amaru possessed surprisingly thin, delicate lips for such a large mouth that had only stopped moving while they’d made the underwater trip back to the camp on shore.
As they reached the surface, Amaru laughed and thrust his hands toward the cloudy sky. It would have been nicer if the sun had been there to greet him for his first day awake in five hundred years, but it was likely Amaru was just happy to see anything that wasn’t cave walls or the inside of his own eyelids.
Placing a foot on shore, Luka helped Amaru onto land and shifted back into his human form. The mischievous mage reached up and poked a finger at Luka’s hand, touching the exact spot he’d kissed when he’d awoken, as if he could sense the place had stopped tingling and he needed to fix that.
Luka tried his best to not read too much into it. Almost immediately failed. No, come on, brain, don’t be like that. Amaru was affectionate by nature. He probably would have kissed anyone who’d been standing there. Gregori. Rodrigo. Sam. Anyone.
Then why did his hand tingle? Only Vasily was supposed to make him tingle like that. This was all weird and confusing…and wrong? Was it wrong?
He glanced over Amaru’s head at Vasily as the dragon made it to shore with them, deposited Evora safely, and shifted. Those dark chocolate eyes had been a comfort for so many years—always the support and confidence Luka needed to move forward—but this time they seemed to reflect the same turmoil twisting knots in his own stomach.
Was Amaru their mate? Or Vasily’s mate? Or…even his mate?
He didn’t know what he was supposed to feel. The dragons he knew who’d been lucky enough to find their mates talked about a sense of completeness, overwhelming joy, of their dragon becoming possessive, of being able to take a full, deep breath for the first time in their existence.
But he didn’t feel any of those things. His dragon was silent. His brain was filled with tangled questions and his heart…just ached.
“There you are!” Ravi’s bellow jerked Luka from his twisting thoughts and he forced a smile as he watched a crowd descending on them. He was surprised to see the Burkhards, but either they’d grown impatient waiting or Rodrigo had called them in. Considering who these men were, it was fifty-fifty odds.
At Ravi’s side were his mate Sora, Gunter, Nikki, Sam, and Dimitri. And they all had their eyes on Amaru. Sam, in particular, looked as if he were vacillating between fainting and exploding out of his skin. Luka got it. Amaru didn’t just represent a lifetime of research into a people thought long lost from the world, but he was also living and breathing hope.
“I’m assuming you know these noisy people,” Amaru said out of the side of his mouth before the others reached them.
“Yes, they’re all friends. Some are from my clan and some are from the Fire Dragon Clan we’re friends with.”
Amaru twisted around, cocking his head with eyes narrowed at him. “The ice dragons and fire dragons are friends? I thought rival dragon clans didn’t get along with each other.”
“You don’t have to worry. Both ice dragons and fire dragons are your friends. We’ll explain more later,” Vasily interjected as he came to stand beside Luka so Amaru was bracketed by them.
As soon as the others reached them, they were buffeted by everyone speaking at once. Waving his phone in the air, Sam’s voice rose above the others to say, “You sent pictures, I need more information than just pictures.”
